It appears the weak March jobs report, a surprise to many analysts, was a fluke. It was also worse than originally calculated. But gains in April made it the 13th of the past 14 months when more than 200,000 new jobs were created. The Bureau of Labor Statistics
reported Friday that the economy created 213,000 seasonally adjusted private new non-farm jobs in April. Government added 10,000 new jobs.
The bureau revised February's count from 264,000 to 266,000 new jobs, after having revised them downward from 295,000 last month. March's original tally of 126,000 new jobs was revised to 85,000.
The unemployment rate, labeled U3 by the BLS, fell to 5.4 percent. The bureau uses what it calls U6 to measure both unemployment and underemployment and includes people with no job at all, part-time workers who want full-time jobs but can't find one, and many "discouraged" workers. That fell from 10.9 to 10.8 percent.
The civilian workforce rose by 166,000, after having fallen 96,000 in March. Wages barely edged upward.
The employment-population ratio stayed at 59.3 percent for the fourth consecutive month. Labor force participation rose slightly to 62.8 percent.
The BLS calculated that 8.5 million people were officially out of work in April. But that number does not count Americans who have left the workforce and still want a job but have given up searching for one.
The BLS measure also counts Americans in their prime working years—when they are aged 25-54. This gauge in some ways gives a better picture of how well the job market is doing because it excludes workers during their late teens and early 20s when they are more likely to be in school or traveling or exploring their identity and often don't hold down a full-time job or only do so sporadically out of choice. The 25-54 employment rate reached a peak of 81.9 percent in April 2000. The month the Great Recession began, in December 2007, the figure was 79.7 percent. It reached a low point of 74.8 percent in November 2010. On a slow rise ever since, it is now 77.2 percent, the same as in March.
The BLS warns that its "monthly change in total nonfarm employment from the establishment survey is on the order of plus or minus 90,000." That means the "real" number of new jobs created in April wasn't 223,000 but somewhere in a range between 133,000 and 313,000.
For more details about today's jobs report, please continue reading below the fold.
Key aspects of the report:
Hours & Wages
• Average hourly earnings of private-sector production and nonsupervisory employees rose 2 cents to $20.90 in April
• Average work week for all employees on non-farm payrolls remained at 34.5 hours.
•Average hourly earnings for all employees on private non-farm payrolls rose 3 cents to $24.87.
• The manufacturing workweek fell 0.1 to 40.8 hours.
• The average workweek for production and nonsupervisory employees on private non-farm payrolls was unchanged at 33.7 hours.
Among other news in the April job report:
Demographic breakdown of official (U3) seasonally adjusted jobless rate:
• African American: 9.6 percent, down from 10.1 percent in March
• Latino: 6.9 percent, up from 6.8 percent in March
• Asian (not seasonally adjusted): 4.4 percent, upfrom 3.2 percent in March
• American Indian (data not collected on monthly basis)
• White: 4.7. percent, unchanged from March
• Adult women (20 and older): 4.9 unchanged from March
• Adult Men (20 and older): 5.0 percent, down from 5.1 percent in March
• Teenagers (16-19): 17.1 percent, down from 17.5 percent in March
Duration of unemployment:
• Less than five weeks: 2.729 million, up from 2.488 million in March
• 5 to 14 weeks: 2,307 million, down from 2.312 million in March
• 15 to 26 weeks: 1.139 million, down from 1.253 million in March
• 27 weeks and more: 2,525 million, down from 2.563 million in March
Job gains and losses in selected categories:
• Professional services: + 62,000
• Transportation & warehousing : + 15,200
• Leisure & hospitality: + 17,000
• Information: + 3,000
• Health care & social assistance: + 55,600
• Retail trade: + 12,100
• Construction: + 45,000
• Manufacturing: + 1,000
Here's what the seasonally adjusted job growth numbers have looked like in April for the previous 10 years.
April 2005: + 363,000
April 2006: + 182,000
April 2007: + 78,000
April 2008: - 213,000
April 2009: - 684,000
April 2010: + 247,000
April 2011: + 321,000
April 2012: + 87,000
April 2013: + 187,000
April 2014: + 330,000
April 2015: + 223,000
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The BLS jobs report is the product of a pair of surveys, one of more than 410,000 business establishments called Current Employment Statistics, and one called the Current Population Survey, which questions 60,000 householders each month. Here is the BLS's explanation of its methodology. The establishment survey determines how many new jobs were added. It is always calculated on a seasonally adjusted basis determined by a frequently tweaked formula. The BLS report only provides a snapshot of what's happening at a single point in time.
It's important to understand that the jobs-created-last-month-numbers that it reports are not "real." Not because of a conspiracy, but because statisticians apply formulas to the raw data, estimate the number of jobs created by the "birth" and "death" of businesses, and use other filters to fine-tune the numbers. And, always good to remember, in the fine print, they tell us, with a 90 percent confidence level, that the actual number of newly created jobs reported each falls within a plus or minus 90,000 range.